This Thursday, I’m going to do things a little differently.
In previous weeks, our meetings have followed a structure of presentation, demos, and breakout sessions.
I intend to keep it mostly the same, however I’ve noticed that the tweak we’ve made to breakout sessions has led to some really great discussions and learning.
This week, I’m going to do a shorter presentation than normal. It will equip you with just enough information to tackle the exercise in the breakout session.
Thursday’s Topic
This week, that topic will be the basics of HTTP.
In college, I took 5 CS courses and we never talked about HTTP requests (recall, I wasn’t a CS major). Sure, I probably made a couple of them for projects here and there, but I didn’t understand what GET, POST, PUT, DELETE were. I didn’t understand JSON. I had no idea what HTTP headers were.
Many of you are already quite familiar with the basics, but the group exercise will be fun. I believe HTTP is more relevant than quicksort to most software engineers, yet we spend time in school mastering algorithms and gloss over HTTP.
This Thursday, we’ll:
Cover the basics of HTTP
Continue w/ Demos
Split into small group exercises. Teams will choose one of the following:
A) Figure out what happens when you type google.com into your browser's address box and press enter (common interview question)
B) Test your knowledge of HTTP: spin up a Hello World web server in an unfamiliar language
Tuesday Interview Prep
First session went well!
Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5PM PDT, the second installment of interview prep continues. Check out the #🏢-interview-prep channel on Discord for more information (it’s where we share the Zoom meeting link).
Baby Steps
Last week, I stumbled upon a podcast with the author of a book called “Tiny Habits”. The author presents all sorts of reasons for why baby steps are the most sustainable way to affect change in your life.
I know you’re busy, and that your projects might be daunting, but I want to encourage you all to take baby steps to ship daily. As the saying goes - “How do you eat a whale?”.
One byte at a time.
I saw an old tweet by someone who shipped a side project while working full time (just like many of you, who are full time students!). This is how:
Keep it up everyone!
See you Thursday/Friday!
Phil